Halo Wars

This is the way the franchise ends. Worth: $4
based on 360 demo and videos

Mom, can I keep these guys?

I'm a Mac guy, so I knew about Halo way before it came out on Xbox and then PC. I first heard about it as an idea for a Mac-only RTS. Later it was going to be a Mac-only FPS, but at the time I promptly forgot about Halo the RTS because RTS games are tedious, stressful, and more often than not you spend hours on something that doesn't work out. In other words, you can lose.

To hell with losing. Getting my butt kicked, sure. Getting my ass handed to me, fine. But losing? That's too much like real life. I like FPSs, Racers, and RPGs because ultimately you're going to win. The only strategy game I've liked since Myth:The Fallen Lords was Civilization Revolution, which is an RTS like Will Farrell is Phil Hartman. CivRev is strategy-Lite, which is fine because it's so much less challenging than the typical hardcore strategy game. When I played CivRev I felt confident that my three hours of gaming would end in world dominance and not in frustration.

Halo Wars may not be totally hardcore, but it's still got the tedium of building a base and moving your little guys to the battles. The problem is, I'm not having any of the fun. All my little guys are. The game itself works great, the controls are easy to learn and use, the maps are easy to navigate around on, and c'mon, it's Halo! It's got to be good, it's Halo! Halo!!!

But it's not Halo. This game is why the minds at Bungie circa 1998 switched Halo from an RTS to an FPS. It's boring. They should have made another Halo 3 expansion like H3 Recon (aka ODST <- terrible name!). Why not H3 from the Arbiter's POV? With so much rich material it's a shame that this much talent went into something so forgettable from an otherwise stellar franchise.